Ninja Cow Farm LLC

We started our little farm blog in the middle of 2013. At that time writing on the internet was kind of scary. Not knowing what the reaction would be, maybe (probably) saying something stupid and getting flamed for it. Learning new software. Fortunately, nobody was looking anyway so the mistakes, while immortal via the power of the interweb, weren’t really that big of a deal. At the end of the year I got a surprise email from WordPress showing our first year’s statistics.

That first partial year we had 4100 site views! Wow! And one day, we had 123 visits. In one day! I was pretty stoked. In my post about the statistics I focused on the fact that I’d been trying to post every day and I pretty much had. 160 posts was just about on target. Having some views just made it all the better.

Last year I didn’t publish the site statistics because I was busy selling my company and going into farming full-time. But the report is still out there so for comparison here is last years report.

It was our first full year of having the website and the growth was tremendous. From 4100 visits to 29,000! I kind of felt like a real blogger, averaging almost 2500 visits per month to our little farm website. With those numbers, it wasn’t just my mom and a couple of friends. We had real readership. One day we had almost 600 visits in a single day. Now we were cooking and I could feel a little cocky about my blogging career. Of course I wasn’t getting paid, or really selling that much meat but we really didn’t have that much to sell at that time anyway so I took what success I could.

This year’s statistics have just been released. 51,000 visits to our site, averaging 4,250 per month. We didn’t exactly double our growth but still awesome. Except the report came out before the end of December. In just December, we had over 11,500 site visits, meaning if we keep this pace for 2016, we’ll have over 125,000 visitors to our little farm site. That is a staggering amount of traffic for a site showing pictures of piglets and selling a little bit of meat on farm only. This volume also means we’ve added in things like our online scheduler and cleaned up some of the menus. We never really stop working on the site so expect more to come.

Also, we are adding more product all the time. We already have honey, soap, jams, and also wine. We have recently begun stocking raw pet milk. We have in the works fresh farm baked breads and pies and also cheeses will be coming in January.

Who knows what 2016 will bring, but we are looking forward to it, whatever it is.

With the cows and the chickens working overtime (plus a few farmers), we are back in business on milk and eggs.

Also for those waiting on pork products, I dropped off three pigs this morning at the processor so we can get some pastured, grain-free, GMO free, anti-biotic free, porky goodness coming our way.

We were only scheduled to take two pigs but we had such a run on pork the last few days that we added an extra pig to the load this morning.

That should give us about 500 pounds of pork coming our way, mostly different sausages and chops. However we are bringing in one whole boneless loin for those of you who have asked for one in the past. We are hoping to get everything ready and picked up this week but it may be next week before everything is done. There is only so much we can do to rush the processor.

Either way, we’ll be sure to let you all know when we get bacon, breakfast sausage, pigs feet (yes, I ran out of pigs feet!) etc, back in stock. In the meantime, we still have plenty of pork chops, Boston butts, BBQ, etc in the freezer, plus all the beef and chicken in our other freezers. Just hop on our handy online scheduler and make arrangements to stop by and grab some meaty goodness.

Every year, SWMBO has Santa Claus come to the house to see all the kids. This all started when one of our friends kid, who is autistic, wasn’t too happy about seeing the big man at the mall. So SWMBO arranged for Mr. Claus to come to us at the farm. 10 years later we are still at it and Santa has gotten to know all the kids as they’ve grown up.

Everybody gets time with Kris Kringle and he makes the whole thing very personal for each kid. It’s quite amazing to watch and I’m very happy she started this tradition. As you’d expect, Santa has it going on and knows how to make the kids feel special.

Each year, the kids get older, and we add new kids to the mix.

This year, Santa wanted to meet Holly, our runt piglet who lives in the house with us (so far.) I wasn’t sure he really wanted to meet her but he said he loved pigs so I went and got her for him.

Holly, like many babies on Santa’s lap for the first time, screamed and cried the whole time. He was very nice but she wasn’t having it. The visit culminated with Holly biting Santa on the finger, guaranteeing coal in her stocking for some time to come. He then put her down on the ground to calm down.

Holly showed her displeasure with the whole experience by promptly backing up and peeing on the carpet. You can see SWMBO and Grandma (bottom left) both diving to catch her but it didn’t slow Holly down one bit. I’m laughing, of course. What else can you do?

Everyone had a large time. It’s not every day you get professional pictures (thanks Diane!!) of a piglet and Santa Claus.

I hope everyone had as good of a Christmas as we did and I hope you are ready for a great new year.

We’ve had so much business lately that we’ve decided it was time to add in a booking app for scheduling appointments. This is to make it easier for you to get a time to stop by in the future, saving you from having to call/email/text me and go through the back and forth of finding a time that works for both of us and scheduling the appointment. Now you can simply click on the link on our website at the top of the page “schedule a visit” and pick the date and time you’d like to come by. You also pick whether you are looking for a tour or to just stop by and pick up meat. There is logic built into the app that should book the appropriate amount of time and not double book so we mitigate possible conflicts.

I’ve spent a couple of days setting up the new booking system. It’s not perfect, but hopefully this new system will make things easier for you when you are trying to get out to the farm. If you have any trouble, you can always get me via text or email. The purpose of this thing is certainly not to hide behind automation. We’re always glad to hear from you.

After last weekends rush, we had to get things back together in the store and ready for everyone’s needs before Christmas. I’ve spent the last couple of days hauling all kinds of product; chicken, eggs, wine, honey, soap, and pork. Tomorrow I’ll be hauling beef to finish off all the empty corners in the store so we will be bursting at the seams ready for your needs before Christmas.

We have more product on hand than we’ve ever had before so we should have everything you need to wow the in-laws this Christmas.

And since you’ll be hosting your family all day, don’t forget the social lubricant we just started carrying. It makes the day go easier.

We’ve also had some folks from out of town ask us to do gift certificates. We do indeed do gift certificates so if you’re reading this from afar, just drop me a line and we can make something up for that special someone who lives here in North Carolina.